by John Saul
“There’s some kind of coating on the things,” Langston had told Patchell. “It’s a protein of some kind, but I can’t figure out why it’s there or what it’s for.”
It had been Patchell’s idea to inject a sample of the fluid in the syringe into a lab animal and see what happened. They’d selected a chimpanzee, and an hour after giving it the injection, had anesthetized it and strapped it to the bed on the institute’s nuclear magnetic resonator.
A moment later images began to form on the screen as the machine bombarded the chimpanzee’s body with incredibly brief bursts of powerful electromagnetic energy, then measured the reaction of the atomic nuclei within the animal, reconstructing in visual form the structures of the tissues themselves.
After some fine-tuning by the technician, the tiny micromachines began to show up as dark flecks in the bloodstream.
“I don’t get it,” Langston murmured almost under his breath. “They just seem to be floating around.”
Tom Patchell frowned but said nothing, his mind already struggling to remember something he’d read several months earlier. Then it came back to him. “Let’s wait a few minutes,” he said, “then focus on the chimp’s brain.”
Fifteen minutes went by, and then, as Patchell issued instructions to the technician, images of the ape’s brain began to take form, greatly magnified, only a few millimeters showing at any single moment.
The clock on the wall kept moving, and the minutes crawled by as they kept searching through the depths of the chimpanzee’s brain, looking for anything out of the ordinary.
Finally, Tom Patchell thought he saw something.
“There!” he said.
He leaned forward to study the screen. Although most of the dark specks representing the micromachines were still surging through the capillary system like leaves floating in a swift-moving stream, a few of them seemed to have adhered to the walls of cells, almost as if some of the leaves had been caught in the exposed roots of trees along the stream’s banks. “I don’t get it,” Langston said. But Tom Patchell wasn’t listening to him.
“Blow that one up,” he instructed the technician, using the tip of a pencil to touch one of the specks on the screen.
The technician’s fingers flew over the control panel of the resonator, and a few seconds later a new image appeared. This time the image on the screen was of only a few molecules, enlarged millions of times, to the point where the molecular structure itself was visible.
The technician touched a button and the image froze on the screen. Patchell studied the images produced by the resonator for a few moments, then whistled softly. “For Chrissake,” he muttered. “Someone’s done it.”
Langston was bouncing impatiently on the balls of his feet now. “Done what?” he demanded.
“Look at that,” Patchell told him. “See those molecules there? The ones that are slightly intertwined?” Langston looked closely at the screen and nodded. “Well, what they’ve done is something that’s supposed to be only in the early experimental stages,” Patchell explained. “What you’re seeing there are two different molecules, one of which is a part of a nerve cell, the other of which is part of the coating on one of those micromachines.”
“So?” Langston asked.
“Every type of cell in the human body has a distinctive protein coating to it. Whoever made those micromachines has coated them with specific kinds of substances that will allow them to adhere only to specific kinds of cells. In other words, what the micromachines do is keep traveling through the bloodstream at random, until they come into contact with the type of cell they were designed to adhere to. When they do, they lock onto that cell. It’s almost as if each of the machines has a unique set of fingers, and it’s searching for a perfectly fitting glove.”
Langston’s eyes widened. “So what you’re telling me is that there could be any number of different coatings on those things, and it doesn’t matter how or where they’re injected into the blood system. Once released, they’ll sort themselves out all by themselves.”
Patchell’s expression set grimly. “You’ve got it,” he said. “I think we ought to wait a couple of hours, then take another look and see what we’ve got. And in the meantime, let’s see what we can do about figuring out the triggering method.”
Leaving the still-unconscious chimpanzee under the watchful eye of the technician, Peter Langston and Tom Patchell had returned to the physics lab, where they’d been working most of the time since then. The answer had come to Peter quickly enough. “It has to be radio waves,” he’d said. “From what Judith said, they have to be triggering these things by remote control.” He’d tapped a tiny area near the base of the object displayed on the screen of the electron microscope. “That area right there looks as if it could be some kind of a simple receiver.”
By early afternoon they’d been ready. Several slides had been prepared, each slide containing a drop of the saline solution from the hypodermic syringe. The syringe itself was sealed in a lead-lined container; the container was in a safe in Langston’s office. Now they were in the microscopy lab, where Langston had jury-rigged a small transmitter capable of broadcasting a weak signal in a broad range of frequencies, and there were electrodes attached to the microscope slide itself.
The technician adjusted the electron microscope, and on the monitor images of half a dozen of the tiny devices appeared. Patchell touched a switch, and a tiny electrical charge, measurable only in millivolts, began coursing through the solution in which the micromachines floated. Finally Langston turned on the transmitter, chose a range of frequencies near the high end, then began turning a dial. For a few seconds nothing happened at all.
And then, so suddenly neither of them actually saw it happen, the image of one of the micromechanisms disappeared from the display screen.
“What the hell?” Tom Patchell muttered.
Patchell frowned, made a note of the exact frequency at which the transmitter had been broadcasting when the object suddenly disappeared, then readjusted it.
A moment later another of the objects disappeared.
“I want to get this on tape,” Langston said, and the technician nodded.
“It’s already done. If you want, I can play that last one back.”
“Do it,” Langston replied.
The monitor went blank, and then the images reappeared. At the top of the screen a chronometer displayed the lapse of time in microseconds, and another scale monitored the changing frequency of the radio waves to which the sample was being exposed.
As they watched, the switch at the base of one of the devices began to close, and a few microseconds later the contacts touched. Then the protuberances at the opposite end of the device began to change, and finally the whole device started to disintegrate.
“I was right,” Langston breathed to himself. “As soon as the contact closes, the transformer begins drawing current out of the solution, and the whole thing heats up to the point where it burns.”
Now it was Patchell who frowned. “But why didn’t they all go?”
“They’ve tuned the switches to different frequencies,” Langston explained. “It wouldn’t surprise me if we find out that there’s a correlation between the frequencies that activate the switches and the kinds of cells they attach themselves to.”
A few minutes later they were back on the second level beneath the surface. The chimpanzee, still unconscious, lay inert on the bed of the resonator. The technician glanced up from the magazine he was reading. “Ready to take another look?”
Patchell nodded, and the technician set the magazine aside and began manipulating the controls of the machine in the next room. The scan began, and a greatly enhanced image of the chimpanzee’s brain appeared on the screen.
Tom Patchell studied the screen carefully. Satisfied, he nodded. “They’ve clustered all right,” he said. “See? There’s a mass of them here in the hypothalamus region, and more here and here, in the area of the cortex.”
They
removed the chimpanzee from the resonator, transferred it to a gurney, and wheeled it back to its cage. By the time the two men had brought their small transmitter downstairs and set it up, the sedative had begun to wear off. The chimpanzee was beginning to stir.
Half an hour later the transmitter had been set up near the chimp’s cage, and two syringes filled with a powerful tranquilizer were on a counter next to the lab sink. The chimpanzee, awake now but still lying on the gurney, watched them languidly.
At last Peter Langston turned on the transmitter and began broadcasting a sequence of frequencies, each of which had activated some of the micromechanisms in the lab.
As they watched, the chimpanzee’s eyes suddenly widened and it sat up on the gurney, its head turning as if it was trying to focus on something invisible to either Langston or Patchell.
“Change the frequency,” Patchell said.
Langston made a small adjustment on the transmitter. The chimp began to spit, wiping its mouth with its hands as if trying to rid itself of something bitterly distasteful. Then, as Langston once more readjusted the transmitter, the chimp began screaming with either rage or pain, and flung itself off the gurney, leaping up to grasp the bars of the cage.
“Shut it off!” Patchell yelled, but the order was unnecessary. Peter Langston had already cut the power to the transmitter.
Both men stared at the animal, which was now lying inert on the floor. Its face bore an oddly human expression, part frightened, part almost puzzled by what had just happened to it. Patchell hesitated a moment, then carefully opened the door to the cage, keeping a wary eye on the animal within.
The chimp watched him but made no move either to attack or to try to escape as the neurosurgeon slowly stepped inside the cage.
“Hand me one of the needles,” Patchell said quietly, his body tense, his eyes never leaving the chimp.
Langston passed him one of the syringes, and Patchell approached the chimp slowly, making no sudden moves, talking quietly to it.
He tentatively touched the chimp’s right arm, expecting the ape to jerk its limb away, but instead the chimp simply stared at him, its head cocked slightly. It flinched as the needle pierced its skin and slid into a vein, but made no move to try to pull away.
After a few minutes, it was asleep once more. Patchell lifted it back onto the gurney, and five minutes later they were back in the resonator lab.
“Jesus,” Peter Langston breathed, whistling softly as the images of the chimpanzee’s brain once more began to appear on the resonator screen. “Look at that.”
Tom Patchell nodded, his lips compressing into a tight line.
Though many of the micromechanisms were still visible, others had disappeared entirely, to be replaced with the vivid lesions that were the physical evidence of a series of strokes the chimp had apparently suffered.
“It’s horrible,” Patchell said at last, shaking his head in awe. “If we’d set them all off, there’d be practically nothing left of the chimp’s brain. And all you’d be able to find would be those lesions, without so much as a trace of what caused them.”
Both men fell silent as they realized they were looking at the perfect tool for nuclear-age torture.
Or murder.
Peter Langston glanced at the clock on the wall. It was almost four o’clock. He started back to his office to call Judith Sheffield.
Chapter 28
Judith Sheffield felt as though the walls were closing in around her. All afternoon she had been telling herself she was being paranoid, that no one was following her, or watching her. Still, she kept finding herself drawn to the window. What did she expect to see out there? A man in a trench coat, a battered fedora pulled low on his forehead, his hands stuffed deep in his pockets as he lounged against a lamp post?
Well, there wasn’t any lamp post, let alone a man in a trench coat and a fedora. And if she was being watched, she suspected that the methods would be far more sophisticated than those she was imagining.
Her eyes drifted up to the mesa, where there could be someone with high-powered binoculars—even a telescope—hiding in any one of a hundred crevices in the worn sandstone. There could even be high-tech listening devices directed at the house or tapping into the telephone.
Stop it! she commanded herself, then nearly jumped out of her skin as the phone in the kitchen suddenly rang, its bell jangling her nerves, making her almost run to snatch it up.
“Peter?” she asked, her voice quavering despite her determination not to let him know how nervous she was.
“Judith?” Peter replied, and almost immediately she felt some of the tension drain out of her body. “Are you okay?” Then: “Stupid question. Anyway, I’ve got it figured out. The micromachines are transformers with electrodes, and when we triggered some of them in a chimpanzee, they induced a series of what looks—after it’s all over—exactly like strokes. But I’ve talked to a neurosurgeon, and he thinks the devices could induce hallucinations—both visual and olfactory. I won’t go into all the details right now—hell, Tom and I don’t even have most of the details yet—but it looks like they’ve got this thing down to the point where they can do damned near anything they want to anybody who’s got these things in their bodies. Different ones seem to adhere to different parts of the brain, but in the end, if there are enough of them tuned to enough different frequencies, you could play a person like an organ. You could drive them insane, take away their willpower—hell, if you set off enough of them, you could kill a person almost instantly.”
Judith felt weak as she thought of Reba Tucker and Frank Arnold. Neither was dead, but they had been punishing Frank Arnold, and experimenting with Reba Tucker.
And they’d killed Max Moreland outright.
“My God,” she whispered, the words issuing from her throat in a strangled moan. “Wh-What can we do?”
“Right now, not much except find out how they’re setting the things off, and stop them. Then we’ll start working on a way to flush the mechanisms out of the brain. If we can find a way to dissolve the protein coating—”
The sound of the doorbell shattered what little concentration Judith had been able to devote to Peter. Her mind numb, she tried to gather her wits together. “J-Just a minute, Peter,” she said. “There’s someone at the door.”
She laid the phone on the counter. Still preoccupied with what Peter had told her, and the possible implications of it, she hurried to the front door and opened it.
The moment it was open, she realized her mistake.
All the paranoid feelings that had been growing in her yesterday and today, all the suspicions and intuitions that she was being watched or followed, had been right. For now, standing on her porch, were two men she’d never seen before. They were dressed in a perfectly ordinary manner—both of them in faded blue jeans and plaid western-cut shirts with mother-of-pearl snaps. They wore scuffed cowboy boots, and one of them had a light denim jacket draped over his right arm, covering his hand.
Instinctively, Judith knew the jacket was concealing a gun.
She gasped slightly, stepping backward as she tried to swing the door closed again, but it was too late. One of the men simply stepped forward, his left hand coming up to push against the door, and then he was inside.
His companion followed a split second later, gently closing the door behind him.
Judith’s mind lurched. It was all impossible. Two men—two strangers—couldn’t simply come barging in on her like this! And from outside, she already knew, it would look exactly as if she had invited them in.
She opened her mouth to scream, but the first man, nearly six and a half feet tall, with jet-black hair and broad shoulders that appeared even wider because of the narrow cut of his shirt, reached out with an immense hand as if to grasp her neck.
Her training in karate and judo—the training that had allowed her to overpower Randy Sparks so easily that day in the lunchroom—came to the fore, and she quickly stepped aside, ready to twist the man’s arm a
round behind him. But even as she made her move, he anticipated it, countering it with an instantaneous shift of his own that put him behind her. As his right arm snaked around her neck, choking off her scream so quickly it was no more than a tiny yelp, Judith understood with terrible clarity that his own first move had been nothing more than a feint, a trap she had instantly fallen into.
“Not a word,” he said, his voice quiet but hard as steel. “If you try to scream, I’ll kill you right here, right now.” As if to prove his point his arm tightened around her neck while the fingers of his left hand found a nerve and applied just enough pressure to send a blinding pain screaming through her body. Her lungs automatically contracted as she tried to scream again, then she began choking as her windpipe closed tight.
The man holding her nodded to his companion, a sandy-haired man with cold blue eyes, who immediately went into the kitchen. Judith could hear the sound of the telephone being put gently back onto its hook.
“I’m going to let you breathe now,” the black-haired man said in a tone so casually conversational that it sent chills through Judith’s body. “But if you try to scream, or speak, or do anything else I don’t tell you to do, it will be the last thing you do.”
As he stopped speaking his right arm relaxed enough so that she could suck air into her aching lungs. A part of her mind focused on the fact that before allowing her to breathe he hadn’t bothered to wait for any sign that she’d even heard his instructions, let alone agreed to them. That added to the terror that now threatened to overwhelm her, for she was certain he would do exactly as he had said, and didn’t really care whether she agreed to his conditions or not.
The sandy-haired man was back in the living room now, and he casually lifted his jacket so she could see the gun in his hand. She hadn’t the slightest idea what kind of gun it was, but it was small and compact, with a snub nose that made it look mean and ugly.
“It’s a thirty-eight,” Sandy-hair told her, his lips curling slightly. “And this,” he went on, pulling a metal tube from a pocket of the jacket, “is a silencer. Actually, it doesn’t really do the aim of this thing much good, and if you were to get away from us, I’d probably miss you from anything beyond ten or fifteen yards. But at close range, like if it’s jammed into your back, aim doesn’t count for much, does it?” He smiled coldly, and neither he nor Black-hair even seemed to notice the phone when it rang.
